World War Zero

[Lexicus]

But the article doesn't "assume" a war and specifies that that is only one possible explanation.

The thread title is "world war zero" and the first sentence of the OP

Genetic markers indicate that, just before the dawn of civilization, a generations-long world war killed off 19 out of every 20 men.

 

[Plotinus]

True. I took innonimatu to be criticising the research rather than Zkribbler's post about it.

 

[innonimatu]

I'll admit I did not search for and read the actual paper

 

[Zkribbler]

I'll admit I did not search for and read the actual paper

I tried. I found a very brief abstract [which does not mention WW0], but the main report is behind a pay wall.

 

[Traitorfish]

Does anyone remember that thread a few years back, where some absolute goon kept insisting that the scholarly construct of a "Y-chromosomal Adam" didn't mean that, in a small population, you may eventually wind up with all paternal lines running to a single ancestor, but rather that there was a literal, actual, flesh-and-blood Adam, a hyper-masculine super-Alpha who had sex with every single woman on the planet and was thereby directly and personally responsible for fathering the entire human race?

Because when the article drops things like this,

After a period of some 2,000 years of decline, there was only one fertile male left alive to mate with every 17 women.

I'm getting flashbacks.

 

[Kyriakos]

Of course. Where do you think this alpha male mentality comes from?
It is just collective memory of "there can only be one"

 

[Traitorfish]

That's about the level the author of the article quoted in the OP is working on:

The Stanford University team blames “competition between patrilineal kin groups.” Otherwise known as tribalism.

The fighting must have persisted for generations. And the first signs of civilization arose from the ashes.

Essentially, the victorious clans would exterminate their opponent’s menfolk to ensure ongoing dominance and the eradication of potential competition. They would then seize the surviving women.

Such groups evolved systems of organization based on family membership — generally focused on the male chief of the clan. In terms of chromosomes, it would have appeared as though every male member of a clan had the same father.

My strong impression that his background in history or anthropology amounted to "I saw One Million Years B.C. in a bar last night, the sound was off but I think I got the gist of it".

 

[Olleus]

I tried. I found a very brief abstract [which does not mention WW0], but the main report is behind a pay wall.

I've got access to most journals, I can post a *ahem* summary *ahem* here if people are interested?

 

[Plotinus]

Well, provided it really is a summary - we don't want Big Academic Publishing coming down on us like a tonne of monographs...

 

[Olleus]

Turns out its not even behind a paywall. I was able to access it without my VPN from outside the university. Enjoy:

https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2015/03/13/gr.186684.114.full.pdf+html

 

[Yeekim]

Turns out its not even behind a paywall. I was able to access it without my VPN from outside the university. Enjoy:

https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2015/03/13/gr.186684.114.full.pdf+html

The real bottleneck here is that rotten potato this journal has for a server - that damn article took a good 10 minutes to open, as if I was sitting on a dial-up modem from 1995.
But it did open, eventually. Not that it did me much good. I won't pretend to remotely understand what

the Y chromosome plot suggested a reduction at around 8–4 kya (Supplemental Fig. S4B; Supplemental Table S4) when the female Ne is up to 17-fold higher than the male Ne(Supplemental Fig. S5).

actually means.

 

[Lexicus]

The real bottleneck here is that rotten potato this journal has for a server - that damn article took a good 10 minutes to open, as if I was sitting on a dial-up modem from 1995.

That may be your internet connection, it loaded for me in under a minute.